So after so much complaining about too much tier gear and qq about killing the same bosses several times per week in icc and toc we´re now "basically" back to the old system (more or less). Quick gear making easy for raiders to overgear bosses really fast.

They said the LFR will not lock you out of normal and heroic raids, but not if it will lock you out of LFR itself. I doubt you will be able to farm LFR raids, so I expect that you can only kill each boss once through LFR and once in normal/heroic per week. If not, good raiders will start farming it like crazy and get Tier13 in one week

I think they actually will allow you to do LFR very frequently. Since it's going to be easier and have worse loot and they want people to see the content, it seems rational that they wouldn't care about how much you farm it. I think they're going to allow these pugs to bust their heads against the wall as much as the want until they can figure out boss strats. Normal raiders will be busy in real raids trying to get the higher ilvl most of the time, only doing LFR on offdays, and people will come and go during LFR so lockouts don't really make much sense for LFR to me.

Agreed. They keep trying to make it easier and easier for everyone to raid.. when that is not the problem. The problem is that there is no challenging content for solo players. They should have kept raids challenging for raiders, but actually made solo dungeons that were fun and interesting, along with quests that were challenging. Instead, they dumb down raids and at the same time make quests absolutely silly easy. The firelands dailies were the biggest waste of time ever, killing mobs in 2 seconds.. it was just a chore to get people to log in every day for 20 minutes.

I would much prefer if they allowed solo players to have challenging content, without pushing us to do raids. Still don´t understand how games like DDO can have very challenging solo dungeons and have raids at the same time.

It's difficult to make challenging solo content when the core game mechanics revolve around clicking macros and moving your character. The game only gets complex / 'difficult' when groups of individual players all have to do their jobs correctly at the same time.

Nah, if you can spam LFR, then no-one will do the new dungeons None the less, I'm assuming they don't award VP.Also I was hoping that this would be rolled out to legacy raids - log on, register for Ulduar/ICC/SSC, specify the minimum number of players you're happy to got with, wait until one list fills up!

It's the same loot just lower ilevel. The idea is good as it allows players that normally don't raid a chance to raid. It will hopefully teach the tactics on bosses and perhaps even bring up casual guilds in the loop. I'm not talking about your definition of "casual" i mean, really casual as in barely making any progress in a normal raid. Should at least make the game a little more exciting for a few people.

Do you actually think that a LFR raid will take lets say 1hour to complete so you can do 24 of them each day?
With the incoming amount of failure you will barely able to complete 1 per 2-3 days and this from an optimist point of view

No reason the regular crew cannot run them too, let alone a great way to screen new additions to your team.

I have a feeling that this "raid finder" thing is going to be SO fail on realms like mine where 95% of the playerbase is a joke in itself...unless I missed some info somewhere saying that the LFR tool is going to work like the LFD tool and search for groups including people OUTSIDE of your realm...tho I doubt it. The realm I currently play on has basically turned into a cesspool of really REALLY lame trolls with a very small number of people actually looking to do something useful with their time on WoW. Any PuGs that get put together can barely down trash without wiping 15 times. While I can definitely see this being useful on the "older" realms that tend to have more serious people looking for a PuG - I can only see LFR spelling out TOTAL DISASTER for what people like to refer to as "south park realms..." even with this so-called easier difficulty. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Their current raid finder tool is a total mess - I am having a lot of trouble seeing this new one as being something really awesome. I seriously hope I have to eat my words when 4.3 drops. I really do.

"we'll be tweaking the tier 13 10-player drop rates a little bit (for the better) relative to the 25-player version" If they are going to do that, it'd better be 2 on 10m and 5 on 25m...this better not mean they get two tier drops to my three. -_-

I have a feeling that this "raid finder" thing is going to be SO fail on realms like mine where 95% of the playerbase is a joke in itself...unless I missed some info somewhere saying that the LFR tool is going to work like the LFD tool and search for groups including people OUTSIDE of your realm...tho I doubt it. The realm I currently play on has basically turned into a cesspool of really REALLY lame trolls with a very small number of people actually looking to do something useful with their time on WoW. Any PuGs that get put together can barely down trash without wiping 15 times. While I can definitely see this being useful on the "older" realms that tend to have more serious people looking for a PuG - I can only see LFR spelling out TOTAL DISASTER for what people like to refer to as "south park realms..." even with this so-called easier difficulty. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Their current raid finder tool is a total mess - I am having a lot of trouble seeing this new one as being something really awesome. I seriously hope I have to eat my words when 4.3 drops. I really do.

Yes, that's sort of the whole point of the LFR tool, it is cross server.

So if I want a 4pc that gives my class a ridiculously high dps increase, I'll go from having to VP cap every week for 2 months to chain run LFRs. I'm starting to miss Zul'Chores...

Really doubt they will allow chain LFRs. They're not that retarded to burn their "pinnacle" content that fast.

LFR is not there to show off, it's supposed to fix their mistakes with the gap between nerfed heroics and normal raiding (getting nerfed non-stop to try to fix it). Also, common, taking all that effort of making raid easier to do and all, more interesting drops, tokens, etc. just to let ppl just spam it non-stop 7 days per week? If they wanted it that stupid fast, they would just remove the valor cap instead.

It's just "Looking for Raid", not yet "random raid". Remember that you can only spam heroics if you're going with the random option, you can't just select one heroic and keep going on it the entire day, the 24h lockout remains. There is only ONE raid, nothing random about it. We could argue about it if LFR was released in 4.0, since you had 3 raids to choose from, then it could be possible for them to come with random T11 raid... but with only one??? The only random thing you would be able to get now is the skill of the group you're going to get throwed into... lol

Also another question is will they stick the new Heroics in at 140VP, and will they drop the Zandalari back to 70VP, either on their own tier or merging them with the 4.0 heroics?

So will the first action for the majority of non-Firelands-farming players be:
1) Buy any 278 you're missing with 4000 JP
2) Clear the new heroics (Do they have normal/heroic versions like the ICC dungeons?), load up on loot.
3) When you've hit 980 VP, buy something (bracers?) from the Normal-T13 range and fill in any 278 gaps with all your JP.
4) Go easy-mode raiding! for the LFR-T13 range
5) Back to the heroics!
5) When you've filled up on Heroic-lvl gear, go proper raiding, if you can.

One thing I've got the impression of is that a lot of people have been hitting the 980 VP cap week after week, and so there really is going to need to be a decent JP dump in 4.3.

This will definitely help my guild, who have a few really good core players but are just struggling to get a team together. If we go LFR, we can probably push/pull/yell a bunch of galoots together through a few bosses, and if we can pug a 10-man with the good ones, and then next week bring those back in with us for the LFR....

It is going to suck to try and do dungeons after 4.3. The only reason geared tanks/healers or dps for that matter do dungeons is for the points. After this que times will probably get worse. Thankfully I have a guild to run dungeons with on alts.

So if LFR is going to work similar to the LFD tool, does that mean I can queue up with a full premade? If so, I will still be joining premade raids on my server versus any random idiots in the queue. I can at least gear check the folks in a premade. This changes nothing for my alts if that is the case. They better be adjusting the vote kick function for LFR, because it's terrible how it is now in LFD. Thinking about some of the people I've had to kick out of dungeon groups, those people queuing for a raid makes me cringe: tanks with no avoidance, DPS that queued as heals, healers that have no mana management....the list of nightmares could go on and on and on....

Even if a raid is "easy mode", it's still a raid that requires an understanding of the fight mechanics and a general awareness that, based on my LFD experience, a lot of people do not have. Even pugging the nerfed T11 raids on my alts, numerous groups still cannot kill Nefarian in BWD. Why? Because you cannot power through that encounter. It requires specific organization that a lot of PuGs sadly cannot effectively overcome.

Tell me again why I would want to put myself through that if I can just form a premade?

Because random groups put together with no thought behind group comp, properly gemmed and enchanted gear, or those sneaking in with Season 10 Vicious Gladiator pieces will be facerolling T13 content, even with an easy mode. And these Random raids won't take more than an hour to run.

And I am sure that when a Tier piece drops everyone will congrats the winner, and all que up again to run another so that everyone else can get one too.

That was it for me. As of last night my main is now a farming toon and I am making myself available to guildies for old content runs for tier sets to Trans. I am glad that things are changing for those of you that have been playing for years and are in well established raiding guilds. For the rest of us it is not even making us feel like second class citizens, we are that crazy aunt or uncle that no one wants to talk about but has money so you try to keep them a little happy so they don't leave the fortune to the cats.

New Player class rankings

5% T13 Heroics are easy stop catering to casuals.
10% T13 heroics are hard
10% T13 regulars are hard
10% still working on T12 but doing some T13
15% still doing T11 but also attempting some T12
40% still having trouble with T11
final 10% role players that couldn't care less.

I have run ZG/ZA where it can take a half hour and everyone is happy, I have run it where it takes more than 2 hours and you log out with nothing. I can do T11, I can even bring what is required to Firelands runs. I just have a feeling that this is going to be a big hit to the player base and that all of the bottom 200 servers are going to start seeing a mass transfer to the higher Population servers.

Maybe that is what they are hoping for, a big chunk of cash for transfers. Wonder how long it will be until we hear about Guild Transfers being available with patch 4.3.2